Women love the lie that saves their pride, but never an unflattering truth.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

there is no greater fraud or bore than the writer who has acquired the art of saying nothing brilliantly.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

A long while ago an eager group of reformers wrote to me asking if I could suggest anything that would improve the morals of the American people. I replied that the trouble with the American people in general was not lack of morals but lack of brains.

Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.